The effect of deactivating Facebook and Instagram on users' emotional state

In the meantime, maybe I should just share more photos in the group chat instead...

https://www.facebook.com/?filter=friends&sk=h_chr

This sort of longing for a cozy social media circles exists a lot in tech adjacent circles. However, unless you can align the needs of users with the revenue goals of the company, which in other words simply means that users pay for the pay for the product, this is not gonna happen. While you may be willing to do so, I'm sure many people would simply stop communicating with you because of the additional friction caused, especially when a free alternative exists.

Additionally, the "viral content" you speak of exists for two reasons, which I'm not sure it could be entirely solved even if you had users pay for the product.

Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped. This is where viral content, such as posts from politicians and celebrities, gain their initial spread.

I would also like to note that someone may want to follow a politician or celebrity because they think what they're doing is generally useful or entertaining, respectively.

This leads me to my second point, where even if you self-opted to not interact with viral content, I'm not sure your social circles would also follow through with the same choice. This ultimately means the platform has to take specific measures to suppress some posts based on its content or not show any of your friends' activity, both of which has disadvantages. Further, the former is in itself controversial depending upon which politician is in power and the current Overton window[1].

(Re downvotes: I'd like to know what part of all of this people disagree with.)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window#

Instead of pausing social media altogether, I recently took some time off from the endless scrolling feeds only. When returning it's so apparent how everything is bait for engagement.

The feed hijacks the human attention process on a visceral level. Either with visual stimulus that's extremely intriguing for evolved apes like us (cutting a cake that looks like a dog), or by activating an emotional response from a tribal species like us (stupid takes on politics, in- and out-group stuff).

The rest of most social media apps is fine and offers much of what you are asking for.

Isn’t this just WhatsApp now though? The addition of Statuses, Following and now Communities almost confirms this. People are dropping Facebook and IG, but can’t give up WhatsApp (yet).

Then I realized their business model is so low-rent, they had web 1.0 style protections on scraping all their scanned yearbooks. So I liberated all the ones with anyone I was likely to know and posted them to Archive.org.

You're welcome.

Also: #deletefacebook

Group chats are basically the Circles that Google+ saw the need for but could never get fully set up. A lot of people don’t want to share personal updates and photos to a broad swath of friends and acquaintances.

Meanwhile Instagram and Facebook keep evolving. Facebook is turning into a weird Reddit for older people. Instagram is turning into a hipper LinkedIn, where artists, musicians, and local businesses share career and business updates and advertise their wares.

I’m not sure if that’s actually a “shortcut” to the reptile brain and it’s just about “I have to scroll more to get stuff I’m interested in. At least for me it feels like that and it causes me to use these social media things far less.

For me it feels more like intermittent rewards vs full rewards at once. Obviously for the ad-industry the intermittent rewards are more useful, that’s why we can’t have nice things

A social network is no better than the sum of its parts, and to create something really worthwhile, you have to limit what people are allowed to post (original content only, for example).

Doing that at scale I think is very hard.

No LinkedIn, not you, you boring Ted Talk humblebrag.

Plenty of people like and enjoy "algorithmic feeds". I can enjoy occasionally scrolling through a feed. Banning it is like banning alcohol because there are alcoholics in society.

If you can't handle it, switch it off.

At the very least we should acknowledge the negative externalities. Just leaving it up to the market to figure out (especially if we allow the current tech monopolies to exist) will result in serious societal impact.

I quit Facebook over a decade ago, because others used it to go “look at my shiny car/wife/house”, and I would use it to lose friends and alienate people.

These online environments do not foster any kind of human connection.

But who made the demand, to have everything shown from everyone?

Imagine a social network, where you make your own rules for your feed. That special person who posts rarely, but good will have special visibility. And from that bored family member that basically spams, you will see the message "X has posted 50 pictures and text today" and with a click you can go there.

Any marketplace that is privately owned, is not a free market place. And, the elephant in the room, these social media marketplaces are owned by parties with very particular interests. As long as don't recognise that, we will let ourselves be distracted by details that are always the result of this private control.

Something social must be public, or it isn't social, and it isn't what you and I really want.

Unfortunately, some of my family post insane political views, usually about now in the early AM. Being told that a King of the USA and the elimination of due process are good things doesn't help my mental health.

[1] https://www.facebook.com/?sk=h_chr

News items - frustration at the state the world is in.

Urban bicycle feed: annoyance at the atrocities of the inept drivers.

Feed with cycle side trip pictures: fun.

Rust projects, Electronics: the curiosity of learning.

Also: Bluesky has an absolutely amazing feature which is you can subscribe to someone else’s block lists. That changes the experience quite a lot, to the better.

Would they still if any such poster's feed would strictly only be viewable by families and friends?

(I have no idea)

If you crack and admit it’s fake, everything falls apart and it’s your fault. Expulsion out onto the street follows.

Even worse, now everyone else is going ‘how could you be so dumb to believe it’ and/or ‘you sure fucked up by admitting it was fake’ all at the same time.

But behind the scenes companies did start to think about customer data gathering, retention and deletion in terms of maximal fine of 4% of turnover.

I’m reading this as: The corporate internet is unable to fulfill the actual social needs of its users.

>Most people (me included) have very little intellectual capacity after work and other responsibilities, and need some easily absorbed "slop" to kill their time. I've personally tried engaging in more creative pursuits, but I can't do a good job at it at with all my energy sapped.

And this translates to: Our economic system drains us of so much of our energy that living a fulfilling life is no longer possible, and so we fill our valuable time with the slop that same system serves us.

I think you’re being downvoted because your comment speaks to an uncomfortable truth, namely that none of this is working to advance quality of life but rather to advance the contents of a few wallets.

Old school social networks used to be this noncommital, low-threshold way to connect with others around you. It was really great if you were a socially awkward teen or twenty-something. It's no big deal to friend somebody on facebook (or MySpace, or your universities gamified campus management system or whatever) and see what they are doing, or strike up a conversation. I really miss that kind of network.

I've even been able to successfully use it to remove something private about me from the internet. I don't think I would have even gotten a response had there been no legal precedent.

You can always argue about how some regulations are badly implemented or incomplete but I believe it would be very misguided to believe that no regulations are instead the better alternative.

They would have seemed to care about that, until Trump got told that wasn't working (or, as likely, the market had been swung far enough) and did a 180 removing tariffs on what the public were told were the most vital things to tariff...

All those people didn't change their mind at the exact moment it was needed to swing the stock market back and for you mate the oligarchs money - just Musk et al. have built a brainwash machine at a national level.

It's an important distinction - when interviewed it seems barely any of those being manipulated can form a coherent thought about "the issue they care about".

Plenty of people like heroin too. Liking something doesn't make it good.

I've got a personal policy: No websites that have an infinite scroll. That means no new Reddit, mobile Reddit, Facebook, Instagram, or similar. This also means I can't use food delivery services, since those tend to be infinite as well.

If they're paginated that's fine, even if they're infinitely so. Infinite scrolling is just a very good touchstone as to the quality and addictiveness of a site, and I'll avoid anything that has it.

For this reason I get my news through RSS and like using Discord -- both have finite ends (even if there may be a lot of content in bursts.)

There are society level effects based on the consumption of several goods and services.

Gambling, alcohol, drugs, for example.

The individuals story, in aggregate, mm impacts, over and over, has effects that we must address when arguing for the optimal friction for that good.

I rue the amount of damage caused, before people and society began resisting and arresting its deleterious effects.

But perhaps this is the same process being followed here. New shiny for the reptile brain, eventually the costs are made clear and people decide they would rather not become statistics and instead find joy in other formats and tools.

Then People make those formats or invent ways of engaging with our tools that includes self care and leads to more happiness. We grow older and we eventually get tired of all the online health fads and become crotchety older humans.

Get off my lawn, in advance.

If it wasn’t for the algorithmic feed showing “recommended” posts from accounts I don’t follow and the constant ads, I would have a perfectly healthy and pleasant experience with Instagram.

I really wish they’d let us pay to get rid of ads and configure the algorithm to e.g. only recommend from accounts I follow.

Imagine there's a toggle you can flip in the Settings of Instagram that was labeled "free oxy", and every morning and evening Meta would FedEx an oxy pill into your mailbox. Everyone would tell eachother about it, and few would be able to resist the temptation.

I follow over 700 accounts on Bluesky and strictly use the following feed, and this is not my experience.

Also socializing becomes impossible. I once went to a birthday party only to have it ruined by a friend of the host. Said friend only wanted to talk partisan politics non-stop.

I use FB only because I'm member of a couple of groups relevant to my hobby, and the stuff posted in those is worth following. Unfortunately there is currently no alternative for those, otherwise I would happily ditch FB.

I don't even care about posts from family and friends anymore because nowadays those are mostly about bragging about their fancy dinner/holiday/social life etc.

Not necessarily mutually exclusive. It's like professional wrestling, stage magic, or politics. Some lies people really love.

I watch my girlfriend devolve into this stuff. Waking up and scrolling endless feeds from reddit and insta; it's her entertainment. It's not so much worse than me waking up and scrolling Google News...maybe it's better, in that she gets less depressed about it. But it's fake. It's all fake.

In real life, it took me a whole year to figure out that the people at one particular local pub actually hate me and talk shit about me whenever I'm not around. I only figured out why they were so hostile because the people at my other pub told me. (It's that I'm Jewish, with Israeli family. Ironically, the nice people at the other pub who told me are Lebanese. We get along a lot better than I do with my old antifa "friends") This was a hard-to-get real world experience in how fucked up people can be for no reason. It's not something you can understand properly, ever, on any kind of social media. The media format just gets in the way of understanding other people as people; of understanding truth and factual reality; of differentiating between opinion and fact.

Feeds are garbage, optimized for chaos.

This happens virtually everywhere. It is extremely rampant. I have yet to find a place where there are humans and it does not happen, excl. friend circles.

You want nourishment instead of toxins! ^_^

The thing called "social media" is mostly a US export. It craves monetisation — at the expense of all else, including factual information.

What it has done to US society and public discourse is plain to see.

So, it’s a pretty shit tool for a business to share what it’s about.

I sometimes wonder if it’s the addictive, attention seeking nature of social media that encouraged such behavior, or if they simply lacked the courage to be so inhumane in person.

I’ve stopped using FB regularly, because I don’t like their feed algorithm. I don’t like the ads or the content, and I had curated it by joining local groups and BOFS. The only thing that brings me back now is the _possibility_ of a friends update.

That said, the _frequency_ of updates from friends and family will be vastly different for different people. The feed (if it speaks to you) works to regularize or smooth the frequency. I see FB’s problem and I don’t envy them. The vitality of the platform becomes precarious, and can be supplanted by some other platform with better engagement (ie TickTock).

I’m not a designer or researcher of Social Media, but I’m an emigre of sorts and not many people have that experience. The only platform all of my friends and family use are group private messages using our phones, and the most engaging chats we have are few and far between.

> What I find respectable is someone who tells you honestly what they think

Agreed.

Too bad because other topics like woodworking and mountain biking we're interesting and less... provocative, but that's not good for Instagram.

And all they have to do is be shitty about monetizing their existing userbase via social pressure.

The good news is they'll respect you for something they can't get anywhere else.

There was a mass exodus to Threads, which is now a weird toxic liminal space apparently tuned for woke-adjacent rage bait blended with LinkedIn-for-creatives. "I have an opinion, now buy my fan art."

My take on all of these is that huge corporations are all polluters. We think of pollution as chemical and environmental, but Meta and X are the world's biggest sources of mental and emotional pollution - outside of the MSM.

There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.

Don't forget FB marketplace. I know a few younger coworkers who have FB just for market place.

This is spot on. Facebook proper has supplanted private email chains for a lot of older people. This is ironic because they are moving in the opposite direction as everyone else. Everyone else is moving into private communities, older people are leaving the safety of email chains and, often unknowingly, posting publicly. Facebook (probably intentionally) upholds the illusion that they are posting for their friends. I've seen Facebook actually provide a compelling service to my older dad who keeps in touch with a lot of his old friends on there. It's a much more active community of seniors than you'd guess.

Of course, they are subject to all the ills of Facebook at the same time. Overall I'd rate it as a net loss for society because of that.

It does say something about one’s character that they would be targeted by this and would also buy into it, though. You’d hope people might see it for what it is and take a step back.

I think that’s the tough reality—over time, people gradually become accustomed to consuming random content from random accounts or pages, to the point where the original idea of interacting with friends and family on social media starts to fade away. That said, messaging apps might still bridge that gap through groups.

This is what Facebook was when we all signed up almost two decades ago. No one ever wanted a feed of people they didn't know. Free social media is inherently corrupt as they chase profits abusing the user base.

I have a channel for my neighborhood, another for the parents at my children's school, another for my extended family, another for work colleagues and another for a few friends.

Of course there are other Chinese apps that operate entirely based on feeds. What I found interesting is that on Rednote it tried to suppress your posts from what it infers to be your friends in real life.

I think it is a great approach. There are sometimes I just want to see updates from friends and family. There are other times when I only want to see something interesting to me without necessarily telling all my friends what I'm interested in. These are two entirely different categories of social media and it is a good thing to require users to switch apps.

Facebook was refocusing on friend and family content before TikTok came along. But they had to adjust to the TikTok trend otherwise they would have lost market share or potentially lost the entire market.

You might think you want friend and family content, but actually you don’t. Not as much as you want engaging content.

VC-backed corporations masquerading as public services to gain user networks they can later monetize is the problem.

You might want friend and family content, but engaging content will increase your dwell time and profitability as a user, often against your will.

There is only one danger for the 0.1%. The 99,9%.

* The people that got disturbed by Twitter's boosting of extremists and nazis, now took refuge to bsky. Only to get ripe for the next iteration. But see how many people are still on X, increasingly less aware of the abnormality they are drowning in.

This playbook of cultural engineering should be super clear by now. Ad tech => Private Intelligence.

* How to sell it? Invest in narratives that bend the notion of free trade in order to instill rigid beliefs about Free Markets. Now look at the free markets. :) It only takes you a few million bucks and a dinner to set your company free.

Like parent hinted at, "social media" means the opposite for society.

And it doesn't scroll endlessly. It will display this at the bottom of the page:

> You're all caught up on Most Recent posts

> Check back later for more updates

And any page you follow, including anything that tries to convince you to click through to their website via clickbait, anxiety-inducing headlines, etc.. It also shows FB groups you're in, which are often full of their own unnecessary drama.

I want the former, not the latter. Social media is optimized for the latter.

Toxic people gonna toxic.

> There’s always going to be a shot caller or instigator behind it and everyone else who is weak willed will get on board with it.

Yeah, a major factor was lots of people putting up with some real bullshit for years to try to keep the peace. That, and the ones who did try to do something about it approached the problem-people one-on-one, which just led to them being lied to ("oh no, there's no problem between us") and then smeared even harder to others, and marginalized, having no idea why any of it was happening.

I doubt many are being serious.

Business culture (at least in the US) is so steeped in lying and general fake-ness that in-group signaling as "real business person" involves public performances of bullshit.

It's what you're supposed to do in interviews: bullshit just the right way, to show you understand the game and are willing to debase yourself to play it. Otherwise you're "risky", either due to excessive commitment to ethical principles or to being too clueless or inept to play the game right. That's what's going on, on LinkedIn. "Humility" and "realness" even have to be faked just the right way.

It's incredibly gross.

I think this goes beyond social media to all kinds of media.

elswhr.app

Would love to hear your feedback and any feature requests you might have.

The addictive properties are the reason for the prevalence of the product.

This is called "email" (and/or "text messaging" i.e. iMessage or SMS).

Friends and family more or less stopped posting a long time ago, when everyone became worried about what happens when others have their personal information/drunk party photos. Which is why "the feed" started seeking content from outside content creators so that the services could give you... something.

Facebook, at least, has maintained the "friends and family" feed like you describe, but who uses it? I expect asymptotically nobody.

Oh yeah I remember how this worked on Twitter. Make a post that annoys some anonymous blocklist maintainer, and suddenly you're blocked by a whole swath of accounts. Sometimes just following the wrong person or liking the wrong post is enough. No accountability for these decisions and no way to reverse them, or even figure out whom to approach to reverse them.

Sounds awfully exclusionary for a service that purports to be inclusive. It encourages the formation of authoritarian cliques, as tends to happen in any left-wing group sooner or later.

The outcome was inevitable. People had fun posting posts and photos when it was a novelty, but once the novelty wore off they were back to not wanting to put in the effort. You can only post so many photos of your cat before you grow tired of it.

They tend to have some form of serious mental illness and/or a major substance problem they're not interested in addressing, which leads to emotional dysregulation. So not exactly great people to have around anyway.

Have I lost friends over it? Yes. But that's fine, having no friends is better than having fake friends who undermine you.

I tend to call people out, too. I keep the ones that take it gracefully.

Quality > quantity. :)

Why is it ironic that an Arab would be nice to you? Ignoring the racial/national assumption here, political views from diasporic Arabs, especially older ones who immigrated many years ago, are incredibly diverse and often more contingent on their local issues than world politics. People make the same mistake when assuming political views towards Mexico from Latinos (both Tejano and Mexican) in Texas, for example.

>my old antifa "friends"

Most antifa folks are gonna have a very clear cut moral stance on the state of Israel, even before Hamas' military began the Al-Aqsa Flood operation. Be honest now, have they distanced themselves from you because of your identity, or is it because of your opinions on the actions of the state of Israel? Because even the most hardline "antifa" types I know are more than happy to organize with the likes of SJP and similar organizations of Jewish and Israeli people.

If anything is different today, it's not that social media makes things easier or faster, because we've always had 24/7 talking heads on TV or the radio, we had dailies with evening editions, etc. It's that consolidation is even more prevalent today.

My experience has been that Mormons are generally self-aware, polite, and willing the engage in interesting conversation.

In contrast, LinkedIn influencers' eyes glaze over whenever you try to dig into the details of what they're purporting to talk about. Because, ugh, nerd stuff that's beneath them.

Don't be too discouraged. IMHO it's as simple as there being a significant portion of the population who tend to talk shit about other people in their circle when those people aren't around. If asked, they'll often attribute this oddly unmotivated malice to some conveniently proximate reason but, in most cases, if that reason didn't exist they'd still talk some slightly different shit about that same person.

In my experience, these kind of people will, at various times and in various contexts, talk shit about around half the people in their relevant circle. And who's in the half varies over time and each shit-talker can have different individuals in their half. So how does one end up in a given talker's shit-talked half? It can seem almost random but definite contributing factors include the talker perceiving you as better than them in any way (even if you never imply that - and even if it's not remotely correct). It's enough that their insecurity gets triggered even if it's over something 100% imaginary. Heaven help you if you actually are slightly more attractive in some way, have a slightly better job, spouse, education, hobby, hairdo, car - it can be anything or nothing. It's them - not you. And if it wasn't that one thing, it would be about something else.

The truly strange thing is, in my experience, when many of these people shit-talk about their friend group it's unconsciously triggered behavior that relieves some internal psychological stressor. It's almost like some kind of bizarre Tourette syndrome. On another day, in another context, that same shit-talker would tell someone you're their friend, that you're a great person - and, strangely, in that moment they would sincerely mean it. In some ways, I'd almost prefer it if these people were two-faced liars who spend every moment secretly hating me but act nice to my face. While unpleasant, that's at least easy to understand. The reality that they're just socially schizophrenic and almost randomly acting out triggered emotional stress but without harboring any deep rooted animosity toward me is much harder to mentally model.

Once I gained an understanding of this. I learned to avoid not only the shit-talkers, but the people close to them who don't shit talk but listen to their shit talk passively. While the shit-talkers are flawed, insecure people, the regular shit-listeners are just weak and unprincipled. I decided I don't have time to waste on either type. It's also a good reminder to myself to avoid ever slipping into passive shit-listening. Whenever I'd hear shit-talk about someone else, I'd usually politely question the shit-talker on their inconsistent behavior. This pretty quickly ensures no one shit-talks about anyone when I'm around - and it often leads to being excluded from the group entirely. Which I consider an excellent outcome.

Note: Based on the broad circumstances you related, I'll also add a general reminder to always consider the motivations of whoever told you about the shit-talking. Obviously, that's an all-to-common way to stir up drama and/or deepen their relationship with you. Always remember, if they weren't considered a 'safe' shit-listener by the shit-talker, they wouldn't have heard the shit-talk about you. And, of course, exaggerating (or entirely fabricating) the supposed shit-talk they reported to you is another level of shit-stirring.

Everyone is entitled to say their opinion.

Nobody is entitled to force others listen to it.

It’s quite simple, really.

“Free markets” is an uneducated nonsense. An entirely unregulated market evolves into monopoly. Even without corruption.

Social media for me is just a tool (HN is also social media btw). I find it useful and it meaningfully interacts with the other aspects of my life. When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.

As for the hierarchy: it had always existed and for better or worse the humans and other animals are wired for it. Likewise, they are wired for maintaining the total perceived fairness of the system - so the system eventually autocorrects the extreme imbalance. Often brutally, though.

Lots of people on the left love to be little commissars, and this sort of thing provides a perfect opportunity.

The implication of your statement is "you probably did something to deserve it, comrade" which is very much in keeping with that mentality.

Now, if their blocklists were popular - either they weren’t lunatics or there was a crowd of lunatics. Now, why would you worry about not talking with a crowd of lunatics ?

But, regardless - again - nobody is entitled to an interaction with those that don’t want it, directly or by proxy.

Baffles me, why is it so hard to understand this ?

(You do know that blocking removes the ability to view posts, not just interact with them, right?)

But, in practice, nowadays people who have something to share with those they care about will do so through some sort of messaging application, including Facebook Messenger, so posting really only ends up being for the sake of the casual acquaintances you've accumulated as Facebook friends over the years. What, exactly, do you want to let them know?

On Twitter, don't follow anyone, put everyone in a list, only read that list - you get a feed of chronological posts from only the people on the list, no algorithmic bullshit.

Or use Nostr. Definitely zero algorithm nonsense over there.

Also the way it works, for some reason it decides 2-3 people are my besties (they are not) and just shows me what they post, ignoring what everyone else is posting, so it's still useless.

Also, you can choose to filter that feed by "Favorites". Did you mistakenly end up in that mode?

Am Yisrael Chai.

I could understand that! I wanted to make a general comment, to warn people that although things feel fine now, they should imho pay caution to what these things devolve into. There doesn't even need to be any particular evil scheming from people involved. We usually focus on tech solutions. While blindness to cultural forces is generally what leads us into problems. It is a self-feedback loop in which societal fracturing and extremism is fostered.

> When it stops being the case (eg facebook and twitter) - I leave it behind.

I feel the same. But most people, not only the young, are hooked to social media. For the young, they are essential for social validation, and thus they are easily pried on by people with less morality than you likely do.

> HN is also social media btw

Sure, but it is in a different class. HN at least does it best to be the least dopamine awarding. It is hard to read, and it is difficult to see if someone replied to a question or remark you made.

Traditional fora, mailing lists, HN--they are far more benign than what we are talking about.

It's much the same as the people who get books ghostwritten and say "I wrote a book". It doesn't matter if you understand someone else wrote it, if you say that in your head or out loud enough, your brain will treat it as reality and you will think it to be reality, and that will effect future thinking and feeling.

It doesn't matter if you are playing a character. Play it convincingly enough and it WILL bleed into your reality.

The algorithim is optimized for "engagement", and therefore optimized specifically to trigger addiction as quickly and effectively as possible. The lower level softcore porn and rage bait and brainrot memes are what triggers addiction in people prone to it.

It's exactly the same situation as slot machines. They are made by the same companies in many cases that made some of the best and most fun arcade and video games. But if you aren't prone to gambling addiction, they aren't fun, because they aren't optimized for fun, they are optimized for addiction. The same triggers and stimuli that are most effective at triggering addiction behaviors are LESS effective at being "fun" to non-addictive people.

"The algorithm" is literally not meant to feed people what they want. "The algorithm" serves only the interests of the company, which is to efficiently keep eyeballs looking at a feed in order to sell ads. Giving most people what they want is genuinely counter to that.

But sometimes I do, because saying something to one person feels like I'm demanding a response from them, but saying it to a broad circle of friends allows those interested to reply, and others to leave it. Back when I used Facebook, I was more likely to gripe (or brag) on the Facebook wall than in a personal text conversation with a friend.

(Friends in person are the best option, of course.)

Yeah CL is dead by comparison, and everything is listed on Marketplace, but better? I dunno.

Unfortunately most people seem allergic to nuance on this topic, which really sucks for both Palestinians and Israelis.

So either we train all our friends to use it sensibly -- and convince them to agree with us on what's sensible -- or we sort through cruft to find the value.

To your other points: I find that people who are addicted never heed the warnings, they just get annoying. Just occurred to me: wonder if the addiction is to some extent internalization of the habit; so that fighting the habit becomes fighting oneself….

About HN being less addictive than the others: that is arguable :-) though it is much less driven by pure emotions than the other forms of exchange, indeed !

I think you are attributing too much psychology nonsense on the matter; it's a pretty bad tendency of our times to try to make every behavior some sort of mental illness.

While part of the behavior might look schizophrenic, the reality is that it is that way for plenty of reasons, you being unable to understand/sense them doesn't mean they doesn't exist. Before even going too deep, you can always assume it's some kind of power play or a cheap way to grab attention and support. The people doing this are always working "from behind", because the whole point of it is to gain power without risking a direct confrontation (that could in theory lead into physical altercation or have them loose much more than what they want to bargain for).

I don't like this behavior for many reasons but you can't go around and pretend its mental illness or some nonsense like that; summarizing it as shit talking is a mistake. It's actually the whole point of politics and while you may have an autistic view of the world (no offense intended, I am one) it's how regular people work things out. Not everything can be a perfect competition or a science project with pure facts...

I have found out that the algorithm will adjust itself relatively quickly if you don't click on stuff (at some point it decided I was into foot fetish and it disappeared quickly). With that I get stuff about philosophy, math (memes), science and technology stuff with a lot of animals videos.

No, VC money is what enables the entire multi-billion-dollar loss-leading front end effort that creates the network that is sold in an IPO.

No one else will take that level of risk, and the first eight years of its existence wouldn’t occur without VC money.

You’ll also notice how I didn’t say VC money was the problem. That was a long list of very specific qualifiers I wrote that you strawmanned very efficiently.